Note from the editor: These next few days, we will be re-publishing note-worthy content from the Wisdump archive. This particular article was originally posted by Paul Scrivens on August 8th, 2006.
Developing traffic is a fine art on the web. Sometimes we get lost in the fact that just because it is easy to build a website it does not mean that it will be easy for people to find it. When it comes to personal sites, maybe it is not your goal to have a large amount of traffic come through your site, but for almost every other site in existence, the site will need traffic to survive. The question then becomes how does one go about developing traffic for their website?
Getting Linked
The best way (and one of the hardest) is to get linked to by other sites. Once you are linked by someone else and that site has more than 2 visitors you will more than likely receive a small boost in traffic. However, keeping that traffic is another story altogether. Of course no one will link to you if it is not worth their time. They are trying to enrich the content of their site so if a link to your site does nothing for them, well then don’t expect a link.
Of course for someone to link to you they have to know that your site exists. So what are you to do about this situation?
Comments, Linking, Forums, and Email
These are not guaranteed ways, but they do usually provide some success. The first one involves simply commenting on other people’s sites or in forums where signatures are allowed. The key here though is to post an insightful comment where people will be interested to find out more about you. “Awesome idea!” is the kind of comment that people will quickly bypass. Don’t get me wrong, I love these kinds of comments, but the chances of someone clicking on your name drops. I think I click on links within comments more than I do links within an entry.
In forums the more popular people in the community have sites that become well-known because they are associated with the people and therefore gain respect.
The second method involves including links to other sites, be it within an entry or a blogroll. I can only speak from my own experience, but I often check my referrer logs and if I notice a new link pointing to my site I will always check it out. It’s always fun to find that diamond in the rough on the web. Technorati and trackbacks/pingbacks have made life a bit easier in finding the sites that link to you. People love compliments.
If you think you really have a great article I wouldn’t hesitate to email other sites in your genre to let them know about it. This can only happen every so often as most people will grow tired of reading about your next great thing. However, great content deserves great coverage, but don’t fall into the trap thinking that all of your content is great enough to spam people.
Link Exchanges
Many sites make deals where they will post each others links on their sites. This can be either good or useless. If the site linking to you gets absolutely zero traffic then a link might be useless and only benefitting that individual. Also if their link to you is in a place where no one will find it then it again becomes useless. When doing a link exchange do not expect the person to always be so helpful for you. Work a deal where both parties will benefit.
According to some people Google blacklists “link farms” whose sole purpose is to just provide links to other site without offering anything useful on their site. You may encounter emails from individuals looking to exchange links only to find they will put you on a page that already contains hundreds of links. I haven’t encountered this type of situation in a very long time, but still get the occassional email for 9rules to join a link exchange.
Traffic Generators
A technique that I have yet to try and more than likely never will for any site I create is using traffic generators. These types of sites guarantee that they will send you X amount of people for Y amount of dollars. The problem with these are that most of the time the traffic is generated through pop-unders and if you are like me you close those windows quicker than they appear.
Advertising
Depending on the site and the type of ad you use advertising is still an effective means to developing traffic.
Email Signatures
Do you use email? If so, why not include your url at the bottom. It won’t bring you thousands of visitors, but all you need is one person to start spreading the news.
Content Still Wins
Popular sites are popular due to their great content. It’s a simple formula that always works. However, you have to get people to your site to see the great content and you should have some success if you follow the methods outlined above. The line seems to be divided on whether submitting your own content to Digg and Reddit is “ethical” or not, but again I feel if the content is warranted then by all means don’t hesitate in promoting it. These sites will provide a great boost in traffic, but won’t keep it so what you present to your incoming readers is what determines whether they will come back or not.
If you know the basics of SEO for your site you should be fine in pushing that to the back of your mind. Once you get caught up in trying to play the SEO game you lose focus on what will make your site great and that is the content that is on their. SEO will take care of itself and relying on organic search engine is a fool’s game to play. Just keep producing the content and the traffic will flow if you follow the advice above.
Once you have the traffic you can begin to work on developing a community within your site.
Note from the editor: These next few days, we will be re-publishing note-worthy content from the Wisdump archive. This particular article was originally posted by Paul Scrivens on August 2nd, 2005.
Developing traffic for your site is one thing, but developing a community is an even harder task. With traffic you can follow a formula that will eventually get you results, but building a community around your site (non-forums) can be a difficult challenge. Here is what I have learned about community from the sites I have had the pleasure of running.
The Guidelines
After you have started to develop some traffic to your site I am sure many people think that it requires luck to get some people to comment. A lot of sites receive traffic yet no one takes the time to comment on the entries. I know I don’t comment on every entry I read, but what makes me stop to take the time to comment on some entries? There are a couple of factors that will be touched upon in this article.
The first and most important rule in helping to foster a sense of community on your site is:
Actively participate.
Nothing is worse than going to a site and taking the time to leave an insightful comment to only have it go unanswered. If someone asks a question on your site you should try to be the first person to answer that question. If nothing else make sure that a comment doesn’t go unresponded if it is a good comment. People are willing to discuss topics online just as much as they are in person if someone is willing to listen to them.
At Business Logs we actively try to be the last persons to comment in an entry. We don’t try to kill an entry, but we do like to make sure that everyone gets a response. Of course some comments don’t warrant a response, but every little bit counts.
Develop Thick Skin
There will be many times in which you won’t agree with what people are saying, but that doesn’t mean they should shutup. The best discussions are the ones where all sides of the issue are brought to the table so everyone can see them. If the discussion is restricted so that it is only one-sided then there will be no discussion at all.
A prime example can be found with our very own Mark Fusco. Many times him and I don’t see eye-to-eye on an issue, but that doesn’t prevent us from trying to understand the other person’s point of view. Admittedly there are times where I grow frustrated and simply wish to end the conversation, but that only goes to show everyone else that I am not willing to discuss differing opinions with them.
Moderate Justly
This sort of goes along with developing thick skin. Some sites and bloggers have a policy of deleting any comment that they do not agree with. There are times where people need to be banned from a site and their comments deleted and there are other times where you need to let things slide because they are not hurting the site as much as they are just hurting your feelings.
At the CSS Vault when I first opened up the comments I envisioned that the discussions would entail designers coming together and discussing the merits of the design displayed. Unfortunately, the comments were simple &ldqup;Great site!!!!” type of comments which did not help to further the discussion. I had to strictly moderate the comments and keep only the ones that added some meaning to the discussion. However, I did not delete the comments that were useless, but replaced the text. I did this because I needed the visitors to see that moderation was happening. If I had simply deleted the comments nobody would know what was going on and the comments would persist.
People Like Controversy
But that doesn’t mean you should try to write something controversial every single time you publish an entry, simply that a controversial entry helps to bring in people (if done correctly) and can spark great discussions. These types of entries must be moderated closely and you must be careful and make sure that their is justification behind your entry and that you are not just looking for your 15 seconds of fame.
Comment On Other Sites
If you go leave a comment on someone else’s site that interests them, then they are likely to visit your site and explore some of the entries. Hopefully the find something they like which will encourage them to comment as well. If they do comment make sure to respond to that comment as quickly as possible. Maybe even email the person with your response so that your site stays fresh on their mind.
I can’t count how many sites I have visited and commented on only to forget that the conversation ever occurred. There are too many sites out there with great discussions for you to think you can sit around idle and magic will just happen.
Give Your Entries Time
Compare Forever Geek to Wisdump and you will see two different sites with completely different results. FG has 3x as many entries as Whitespace yet 1/4 the amount of comments. Why? Time.
If your visitors see that you constantly update then they are less likely to take the time to comment on that entry because they are already reading another one and the discussion is going to fall off the homepage anyways. When I go a couple of days between entries here the discussions usually grow larger than the ones that are quickly replaced a day later by another entry. Sometimes though you get lucky and find just the right topic (note the # of comments) and a great discussion and community within a community evolves.
Write an Entry That Warrants a Discussion
Not every single entry I write is a goldmine for comments. Some of them are either not well received or just don’t need to be commented on. Entries that ask questions and leave them unanswered are good ones for developing discussions, but also ones that require the reader to think a bit. If you can get someone to think about what you wrote for longer than 10 seconds there is a good chance they will leave a comment.
This is probably the second most important rule and the hardest to achieve. The topic of an entry isn’t the only thing that warrants a discussion, but also your reputation and the voice of the writing. Obviously these are parts of the formula that cannot be gained immediately, but take some time to work out.
Not every discussion that occurs on your site will be great, but it’s always a nice feeling to see people taking the time out of their day to respond to your thoughts. Developing a community is not something that can happen overnight. It takes a lot of time and some effort on your part to help it grow, but as you can see there are steps you can take to help foster that growth.
Note from the editor: These next few days, we will be re-publishing note-worthy content from the Wisdump archive. This particular article was originally posted by Paul Scrivens on November 8th, 2006.
The overjustification effect (also called the undermining effect) is the effect whereby giving someone an incentive (monetary or otherwise) to do something that they already enjoy doing decreases their intrinsic motivation to do it. As a result of the extrinsic incentive, the person views his or her actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing. According to Self-perception theory, people undergo overjustification effect because by observing what they do and why they did it, the extrinsic motivation appears to be the main cause and so undermines their intrinsic motivation.
And no, the irony of using Wikipedia, a user-generated content site, for a definition to a term has not escaped me.
The issue of rewarding users for helping your site grow and producing content is a very interesting one. Digg is one of the fastest growing sites this year due to the amount of content people are putting on it. More content = more pageviews = more money. Kevin Rose gets a profile of himself done on BusinessWeek and is labeled as the “$60M Kid” because of the work of a couple hundred thousand people that he doesn’t even know. Do they deserve a piece of the pie when Digg gets bought?
How do Reddit users feel about their work being scooped up by Conde Nast? Netscape has offered to pay its top users and while that works for some it doesn’t work for all. If Digg took the same approach it would more than likely fail because the value of the site that users receive has been replaced with rewards.
9rules doesn’t offer its members money for the content they produce or false promises of thousands of new pageviews a day for getting on our frontpage. We know very well the benefits of joining 9rules and do not try to offer anymore incentives than reaching a larger audience than before. You might get 10 new readers or you might get 10,000, but you also get to join a private community where you can build relationships that might not have been possible otherwise. Many people take their admission to the Network as a sign of the great work they have done over the past months and years.
Squidoo moved too soon by sharing its revenue with members because there really was no other incentive to write on the site versus creating your own blog. It doesn’t hide the fact that some people will try to get a quick buck, but communities will never be based around such things. We all know that passion drives any community and if you are a community leader you must be careful of the incentives you offer people.
Many times you can’t even predict the incentives that people will find in your site, you just have to hope that you are providing the right platform for them to find them. It has been argued that to dethrone YouTube you simply have to offer a revenue sharing scheme, but how often do you hear about anyone even coming close to offering what YouTube does in intrinsic value? You have a huge community that fights, bickers, acts immature and is downright rude to each other, but continues to grow and come back. Sounds just like Digg to me.
For 9rules Notes, there isn’t much value to our Users beyond joining a mature community where you can join in on some great discussions, but how often are people looking for more than that? To some that’s all the value you need so by me saying “isn’t much” I am greatly downplaying the values of many of our Notes Users. I am the Top Notes User not because I help run the company, but because I get great satisfaction out of hearing what others think. That’s what makes blogging such a wonderful process and why many of the top blogs are independently run. When the money follows the intrinsic rewards it is so much sweeter than having the money try to push you towards intrinsic satisfaction.
Looking at Digg and their recent changes you can see a split in opinion of whether the recent algorithm changes are a good or bad thing. The real issue you have to look at is whether the changes not only make the site better, but also increase the intrinsic value of Digg’s users. Many people post on Digg not to get traffic to their sites, but because they want to be a top Digg user because of the feeling of power they receive from it. That is their intrinsic value and sure it is selfish, but that is what intrinsic values are based around.
Start to offer them monetary rewards and they start to question whether they are posting for the intrinsic value or the reward and this is when they start to lose interest. Blogging is scary to Mainstream Media not only because it can be done quicker (and sometimes with little regard to fact-checking), but also provides more value from doing something for free versus getting paid for it. The trick is to give your users something that they value more than money. Good luck.
Nowadays web designing is no more a game of art. In this competing age, only professional web designers can survive as many cheap web designing facilities available. Though many easy to use scripts like Java scripts have been designed by the webmasters but still for making dynamic websites, webmasters must have good grip on flash and Java. Still some webmasters are using visual basic for designing but it needs to have the knowledge of other languages as well for good designing. No doubt HTML is the basic language for all designers but for making web pages with content management systems, normally webmasters prefer ASP.Net for their designing.
As the current owner of Wisdump, I’d like to quickly take this opportunity to say a couple of things-:
a. As was pointed out by Matt Mullenweg, there was indeed a “spammy tactic” being employed at this blog in the form of an “embedded a 1×1 pixel iframe loading the ping page for Ping-O-Matic on every one of the pages”.
b. This is against the policy of Splashpress in every sense. We sincerely apologize and own up to it, as has been recommended by Martin Neumann. It will not happen again on any of our sites and the person responsible is no longer associated with Wisdump or Splashpress.
c. Some of the comments on this blog have been moderated, as being “abusive“. As we haven’t gotten round to putting up a specific comments policy on Wisdump yet, we are using the criteria as laid out at another of our blogs, The Blog Herald.
This post is an apology to all concerned and for disclosure purposes only. Comments are closed.
The sentiments in this entry have been brewing for some time now, and I feel it’s high time to tell the world how I feel. It’s about WordPress and Automattic, Inc., and it involves that big chunk of the blogging community that uses WordPress.
Just as many others, I love WordPress and will probably continue using WordPress until blogging runs out of fashion, but sometimes the Automattic attitude bothers me. Months ago I already ranted over at Jack off All Blogs about Matt Mullenweg, Automattic and attitude. From that day on my sympathy for Automattic, and indirectly WordPress, has diminished greatly. That’s because of the hypocrisy, more particularly hypocrisy towards the community.
When Matt expressed his opinion on sponsored WordPress themes, both in the WordPress Idea area and at Weblog Tools Collection my antipathy for Automattic reached a never seen level. I was done with Mullenweg, even with his awesome link entries on Sunday evenings. I believe Matt’s position on sponsored themes is purely hypocritical.
Automattic and Matt have always said that they value and want to continue the open-source spirit of WordPress. And while I see the effort to keep WordPress open, sadly this interest is not community-driven, but a purely business and economic focused strategy. All the good things the community puts into to the WordPress code DIRECTLY benefit Automattic. WordPress is a registered trademark, owned by Automattic.
This means that with every code improvement WordPress benefits, the value of Automattic, Inc grows. Above all, there is a bi-directional exchange between the open source WordPress.org code and the code of WordPress.com, a hosted blogging platform operated by Automattic.com.
Right now, after weeks of reflection on Matt’s stint in the WordPress.org Ideas area, I can only appeal to Automattic, Inc. to start thinking of the community again and to return to honesty. Return to honesty and give WP back to the community. Not only the source code, but also the name. It’s time to create a Foundation, a community-based Foundation and hand over the Trademark registration for WordPress to the Foundation. If you care about the community and want to keep the WordPress community free from any financial clutter, stand up and release the Trademark registration.
Be consequent.
Be consequent with yourself.
PS:Ryan Caldwell’s entry at Performancing stimulated me to finally publish my opinion.
In an effort to avoid the Grammar Police, my blogging friend J. Angelo Racoma edited a majority of my linguistic errors.
Mahalo, arguably the most sexy Mediawiki design out there, is a new vertical search engine. A humanly edited search engine.
When online mediahype boy Calacanis set out to start a new search engine, this was the result of an old personal feud with SEO.
Months later Mahalo has seen the daylight and after some weeks, I must admit that Mahalo could impress. But does the service really stand a chance or is this another A-list hyped platform?
As Google fan, I must admit that last years I have always found what I was looking for and who will tell me what the best result is. Other than that best result a purely subjective factor is.
Who delivers me the best search result? Social platforms such as del.icio.us where I can see how many times geeks have bookmarked certain sites and not other ones. Or is the best result that blog entry written by a guy who has only 300 page views every month?
So far I see two major problems with Mahalo, and in analyzing I obviously kept in mind that Mahalo still in alpha stage is. If an operational, public site really alpha can be, unless alpha the label is to apply when your wiki hasn’t enough of entries yet.
Humanly edited
The top argument to use a humanly edited search engine is at the same time its weakest factor. Human editors make the results slow, slow in update rate. Who guarantees me that Mahalo will be able to keep up with the ever changing internet content and deliver up to date results.
Together with human editors comes bias. And bias can influence search results, especially when I look for commercial results. Just have a look at the results for wedding rings. Who guarantees me that the top 2 results, shops really are the best results? And how could I make it in to the top 7 if I had a wedding ring shop? Offer Calacanis some dollars or a ring?
Google Implementation
The excessive Google implementation can be a burden and degrade the quality of results, sometimes even be the prove that Mahalo’s human factor is contra effective. Best example of this is the news page. Although Mahalo offers many outlets for actual news, if every time I am confronted with Google News at #1, I might as well just use Google News.
Other times I am happy that at least there are some Google results implemented on the site. Even though I know that Mahalo’s aim is to manually write the results for the Top 10000 search terms, when I need a search engine, it also happens to me to search further than the Top 10k search terms. And when I google, I will most of time dig deeper and deeper, using more and more narrowed down search queries.
Mahalo does the opposite for non existing search queries and offers related entries, broadening the results again. What is a better example than a search for Calacanis SEO? Although the first Google result didn’t exactly lead me to Jason’s rant, it had a link to the page I was looking for. Mahalo results are non existing, and related results are everything except related in this example.
The sad thing is that both problems send me back to Google. And that can’t be the purpose of a new search engine, unless I miss the broader picture.
I’ve recently been pondering the effects of social networks. I spent a lot of time on Twitter,Facebook,YouTube,Pownce,and although not a social network AIM and Skype.
I’ve been wondering if they are good for you. I really don’t know the effects. I don’t view it as a time waster because the I’d normally be sitting in front of the “economic neutralizer” aka Television I sit in front of one social network or another and interact with real people. Atleast I hope they are real.
I decided to list the first effects that came to my mind both positive and negaitve.
1. Time Waster
2. Meet New People
3. Social Interaction
4. New Business Relationships
5. Time Waster
6. Economic Neutralization
7. End to modern boredom
All in all I see social networks filling a gap that was lost when we quit having public markets and disintegrated our local neighborhoods by moving our front porches to the rear of our houses. So all in all while some people nag me for spending to much time on social networks I see a lot of value in using them.
So we just bought Wisdump and it’s not easy buying sites and expecting things to just stay the same. No it’s not the end of anything. It’s the beginning of something else.
