Startup Blog Project: Part 2

Written on August 20th, 2008 by Graham

This is the second installment of the Startup Blog Project. For those of you who are just tuning in, the startup blog project is a project in which I, Graham Langdon, founder of Entrecard, start a new blog from scratch, and use only Entrecard to actively promote it. The goal for me is to show you the most effective ways to use Entrecard, proper ways to optimize your blog (which has nothing to do with Entrecard), and other various strategies. Ultimately, I’d like to prove that a blog can grow to be quite large using Entrecard alone. Because I do not want to skew the results, I will not be linking to the startup blog any more, (though many of you already know what it is).

Optimization Period 1

The traffic results are in. In the first three days (remember, we’re optimizing in 3-day opt. periods), we did 2000 visits, 3400 pageviews, and 16 comments.

Here are the analyics for the first three days, or Opt. Period 1

Here are the traffic sources:

The Stumble Effect:

Right off the bat, you’ll notice that stumble brought me 1,566 visits. When I launched this project, many of you claimed that a single link on the Entrecard blog would bring thousands of hits. It didn’t. As you can see, in this period, I recieved only 131 hits from entrecard.com, and this includes hits from the Entrecard site, my directory listing, people visiting me from their Inbox, etc.

How to achieve the stumble effect

People can sit in their armchairs and claim that fanboys will stumble anything I write. They are wrong. If I wrote an article about how tasty hot dogs are, or about my favorite type of brick, no one would have stumbled. People stumbled for the following reasons:

• I chose an emotionally-charged subject matter that many people have had a life experience with (cancer)
• I provided little-known information about a potential risk that nearly everyone is exposed to (non-stick cookware)

Entrecard and the stumble effect

The simple fact of the matter is that Entrecard puts your blog in front of people. Period. Not many (any?) other services can guarantee this. So when you combine the guaranteed visibility with an emotionally charged subject matter, and good information that people probably haven’t heard before, you set yourself up to leverage social-sharing sites like stumble. This goes back to the essential Entrecard axiom: Entrecard will only be as good to you as you are to your blog. Great blogs will kick ass with Entrecard. Poor blogs will flounder. That’s ok, because we’re all here to learn how to make our blogs rock.

Sociable Plugin

I have the Sociable plugin installed on my startup blog. As you can see to the right, this provides chicklets for all the social sharing sites, right at the end of the post. I have no doubt in my mind that it is because of this plugin alone that so many people stumbled my first post. You too can leverage social giants like stumble, but you have to make it dead simple for your readers.

Dropping Strategy

I told myself that I would drop 100 cards per day to get a metered dose of traffic with which to optimize my blog. Well, I didn’t quite hit that target. I did 70, 20, and 50 drops.

Because my blog is about cancer prevention, I dropped exclusively in the Health and Medecine category. Sorry droppers, I didn’t drop a single card on my inbox. I used the EntreBar to drop easily. What I did was used the double-arrow button to open ten windows at a time. On average, I commented once or twice for every ten windows I opened. That is about 17 comments.

I have no doubt in my mind that the comments I made encouraged bloggers to visit my site. And because I was dropping and commenting in my niche, which is an incredibly powerful strategy, the people visiting my were incredibly targeted, and thus they all stumbled my site.

Drop Backs

I received 25, 44, 37 drops on my site respectively. This data laughs in the face of everyone who claimed that my study would be incredibly skewed, as thousands of Entrecarders visited my new blog. My widget placement is TOP-RIGHT so I have every reason to believe that every Entrecarder who visited my site dropped a card, meaning only 100 Entrecarders visited my site in Opt. Period 1.

Those droppers were targeted visitors from the Health and Medicine channel, they liked what they saw, and they stumbled.

Outside visitors from Entrecard?

One criticism of Entrecard is that it only brings you a closed-loop of traffic. “Oh really?” I say, as I point to a chart that shows 2000 unique visitors, out of which only 100 were Entrecarders.

Comments and comment Ratio

Out of 2000 visits, I received 16 comments. To get your comment ratio, you divide the number of comments by the number of visits, or 16/2000 which equals .008. This means that for ever 1000 visitors, I get 8 comments. Now, this was only for the first three days, but I want to improve this. I really want to hit .05 before optimizing anything else.

Optimizing your comment ratio

I want to increase my comment ratio 5x over, and I have no clue how to do it. That is the beauty of optimization. Over short periods of time (in this case three day periods), you test, test, test, one change at a time, and see what sticks. You change colors, change placements, and get a little creative. It is important to only change ONE element when optimizing, so that you know whether it had an impact or not. In other words, if I changed the “comment” button, added SezWho, and put a big image in the sidebar that says “DID YOU COMMENT?” and my comment ratio shot up, I would have no clue what was responsible.

For the second optimization period, I installed SezWho. That’s it. One simple change. If it increases my comment ratio, I will continue using it, and test a change to something else. If it decreases my comment ratio, I will take it off the blog. That’s how optimization works, in a nutshell. I’ll give you the update on SezWho and how it performs in three days.

Proper Control

Because this is a scientific experiment, proper control is absolutely necessary. That means I will drop exactly the same number of cards, on exactly the same category of people. It means I will publish a new post at the beggining of each three day optimization period, and make it equally controversial and emotionally charged. This means that for optimizing comments, I am focusing on posts about potentially risky toxins that everyone is exposed to in their every day life. For those of you who have seen the latest post, you will notice that it is longer than my last one. I wanted it to be the exact same length, but I got so into it that it became longer. I will try to have better control over this in the future, because I do believe that post length influences comment ratio. Anyone who has taken a science-lab course knows that identifying potential bias in the results, and admitting them, is key to the process. So there you go

What do you think?

How should I go about optimizing the comment ratio? Let me know your thoughts and ideas here, and I will try some of them out over the next month or two, as I strive to get that .05 comment ratio!

Wordpress Plugin Wednesday: WPBuzz

Written on August 20th, 2008 by Saphrym

Guess what? Remember that post that Graham wrote yesterday about Yahoo Buzz? (If not, you should read it.) Well, there’s a Wordpress Plugin already created for it. It was written by Travis Johnson and is called WPBuzz.

There are probably many more out there, but this is the one I found and have tested to see if it works properly.

Don’t worry, I’ll get back to those 404 pages next week. But this week I thought this one made more sense. Now Yahoo Buzz does promote content to the home page of Yahoo, but it has to be in a niche that people are searching for. So, blogs that get a lot of search engine traffic, or are gearing themselves towards search engine traffic, will do better with this than others.

Attention Bloggers: Yahoo Buzz has launched. Start your engines.

Written on August 19th, 2008 by Graham

Question: What is the single most trafficked page on the internet?

Answer: Yahoo.com. Not even Google has dethroned them yet. So if there was a way to help each other get our content -and link- to the front page of Yahoo, it might be worth spending a few minutes to hear me out (or rather, beat the war drum).

Yahoo Buzz has officially launched. This is their digg-style service where people vote on articles, only instead of being pushed to the #124-on-the-internet Digg homepage, you’re pushing them to the holy grail of all homepages, the Yahoo homepage. It is a dream come true for bloggers, the single best link you could ever hope to attain, and if I have ever implored you to participate in something, I am going to twist your arm until you are signed up for this service and integrating their buttons onto your posts.

A lot of people think Yahoo Buzz launched a while ago, but the fact is that it was in closed Beta. Only a handful of sites were allowed to use it while it was being tested. Now, it is open. To anyone. You too can put this button on your page:

Now I’m not going to waste your time or mine explaining how it might be beneficial to have your site promoted on the most trafficked page on the internet. Instead I’m going to give you the rundown on exactly what you need to know. So you can do it. Now.

Step 1: Yahoo account

A lot of you already have Yahoo accounts, and a lot of you don’t. If you don’t, you’ll need to visit this registration page to sign up for Yahoo.

Step 2: Buttons

To add a button for people to Buzz It, visit this page. IMPORTANT: The Button code contains a line “ARTICLEURL” -and you must input the URL you want buzzed. So for now, you can forget about the fancy digg-buttons that automatically know the URL. You’ll have to input the URL manually. And there are no plugins as of yet to do this automatically, though I bet someone is working on it as we speak. I’ll keep you updated. For now, it’s easy enough to just add the button code to the end of each post, and snag the url for the post at the same time.

Folks using blogger, you may want to add a Text/Javascript element to your theme, place it right at the top with the button code, and update the code with your most recent post URL every time you publish.

Folks using wordpress, you’ll want to switch over to HTML to input the button code directly into the source. Another tip, to get the URL of a post you have not yet published, simply copy the link location from the “Preview this Post” button, and remove the “&preview=true” from the url, like this:

will give you a link like this: http://entrecard.com/blog/?p=518&preview=true …

…and after removing the “&preview=true” you end up with the url to a post you have not yet published, in this case, http://entrecard.com/blog/?p=518

Whatever you do, do not forget to input your specific article url into the yahoo button. It won’t work unless you do.

Step 3: VOTE

Please vote up all the content you enjoy, and help all of the other Entrecarder’s realize their dreams. Also, do not hesitate to vote down the content you did not enjoy, after all the integrity of any system must be maintained.

I think this is the single largest opportunity to come along since Entrecard launched 8 months ago. With 17,000 active bloggers (that was my other announcement I was going to make today -passed 17,000- woo hoo!) we can get tons of votes for the great content you all have, and with a little luck get some of you to the homepage of Yahoo!

Startup Blog Project: Part 1

Written on August 17th, 2008 by Graham

So it is finally time to do something that I have wanted to do for a very long time. I am going to launch a blog and promote it only with Entrecard as part of an experiment to see how big a blog can get on Entrecard alone.

I am setting out to prove that using Entrecard, and only Entrecard, a blog can grow from nothing to very large, and generate a ton of search engine traffic, tons of social media traffic and of course tons of subscribers. So, I know what you’re all thinking and No, I am not going to take advantage of any administrative privileges I have with Entrecard. I’ll be dropping as usual, spending only credits I receive from dropping and advertising, and overall using the system like a normal blogger would.

This will be kind of an ongoing tutorial, about the methods I personally use to promote a blog with Entrecard, as well as how I launch a blog and what thought and effort goes into it. A lot will deal with optimization. On this blog we’re going to optimize everything -the comments, the subscribe buttons, deep linking other posts, and I’m going to show you how to do it every step of the way.

The Requisites

For my upstart blog, I wanted to blog about something that met the following requirements:

• Something I feel passionately about
• Something that is an increasing trend (meaning it will effect even more people a year from now)
• Something that currently effects a lot of people
• Something that will be a positive contribution to society

I ended up choosing “How To Not Get Cancer” because it met these four requirements. I got the name because one of my hobbies is researching cancer, its causes, and its preventions, and developing a lifestyle that minimizes my risk. I am always preaching to friends and family how public school systems need to start teaching “how to not get cancer” in schools because of the rate at which its increasing and all the risks we come into contact with in our daily lives. I do believe it is the single largest health risk my generation will face in their lifetime.

So the choice was natural. Helping to promote awareness on various causes of cancer, and giving tips and reminders about increasing their safety and decreasing their risk would be making a positive contribution to society. It’s something I feel passionate about. And it will certainly effect more people a year from today than it does now.

Platform

For this blog I am using a self-hosted installation of Wordpress. I do consider this to be the most powerful and customizeable platform for blogging, with an amazing library of themes and plugins. I have a single shared hosting account that lets me throw up a live site for any domain I own, as I work on the project and see if it sticks. So, after activating the .com domain, I added a MySQL database, uploaded the Wordpress files with Filezilla, edited the config file on Wordpress, and did the install. Up in running in 5 minutes. If anyone out there would like a step-by-step tutorial of setting up your own .com domain and installing wordpress, let me know in the comments.

Plugins:

Immediately once Wordpress is installed, it’s time to install some plugins. Here are the plugins I installed:

Sociable: For social bookmarking chicklets at the end of each post.

Edit comments: Because everyone likes to be able to edit their comments

Subscribe Remind: Puts a reminder at the end of each post to subscribe to your RSS

All in One SEO pack: All your basic SEO in a neat little package

Random Posts Widget: To highlight other posts, making the blog a little stickier

Search Meter: Tells me what people are searching the blog for.

Feed locations: Sets all RSS links in the template to your feedburner feed address

Now I’ve probably forgot some, so I may add another plugin here or there. I’ll keep you posted.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service that will be providing me with data pertaining to my blog’s traffic as I begin optimizing the blog. It is strongly recommended that every blogger install Google Analytics on their blog for their traffic statistics -it is by far the best product on the market.

Feedburner

If you’re a blogger and you aren’t using Feedburner, you should be. Feedburner will handle your RSS feeds and give you lots of options to customize it, build a list of email subscribers, advertise in your feed, and of course it will give you that chicklet that displays your subscriber count.

The Theme

For the blog’s theme, I chose Wordpress’d by Blog2Life because it is clean, having been modeled after the admin backend of Wordpress itself. It’s fast loading, widget ready, and a really sleek and familiar design, attractive, professional, yet understated. A great one to start with.

An attractive Entrecard

Of course the most important thing for any Entrecarder is to have an attractive Entrecard right off the bat. This is a single strategy to greatly increase all the traffic you will get from every aspect of Entrecard. People have gone back and forth a bit on what makes a really good Entrecard, and I am of the opinion that it should accomplish two things:

• It should use an interesting image
• It should convey what your blog is about

I figured the name of the blog itself is pretty explanatory, and I just searched around for a commons-licensed image of a cancer cell, opened up photoshop, and voila.

The BlogRoll

You’ll notice the blogroll I have installed. The blogroll contains useful and relevant links. In this case, the links go to a chart, showing the official mercury levels in fish, The Top 10 cell phones in the US by radiation emissions, a Wikipedia article on Resveratrol, one of the most potent cancer-fighting compounds known, and a comprehensive report about the flame retardants present in the dust on your computer screen.

What this BlogRoll does is it builds my credibility and sends a strong message to the reader/visitor: This BlogRoll is NOT for sale. These links are not paid for. They’re here because I want you to read them, if your interested in this topic. I may add more, or switch some out over time, but the general idea is to provide useful links that I personally think would be of great value to anyone interested in the topic.

Initial Optimization

So here’s the plan. The first part of this series is going to be about OPTIMIZING. I think that one of the greatest opportunities Entrecard gives the blogger is that of optimization. That is, I can get a guaranteed and metered stream of traffic to my blog, of real people / real bloggers, and using that traffic stream and analytical tools, I can make tweeks to my blog to increaes the number of comments, clicks, subscribes, and so forth.

I’m going to be working in 3-day optimization periods. That means for each element I change, I am going to leave it for three days, and examine the statistics over that period to see if certain actions increased or decreased. Because the blog just launched and I need accurate statistics, I am going to wait three days before changing the first element.

Dropping

I am going to be dropping a steady 100 cards per day. At first, I will only drop them on other blogs in the Health and Medicine category. I know that these bloggers are concerned for their health and the health of others, and so my niche will appeal to them in a very targetted fashion.

To do my dropping, I’m going to use the EntreBar because it makes life so easy. Here’s what I have it set to:

Because I need repeat, random samples of targeted traffic this setting, Health and Medicine on Random will give me just what I’m looking for. There are almost 1000 blogs in the Health and Medicine category, and once I have dropped on all of them, I am going to start dropping on the “Self Improvement” category, “Parenting and Family”, “Lifestyle”, and “Environement”. I think that these categories will give me the most targeted traffic. The beutiful thing about this system is that you know if a blog is about the environment, then that blogger actually cares about the environment. And you know if someone is blogging about self improvement, then they must be interested in self improvement.

So that is my strategy, to drop on relevant targeted bloggers only. As I drop I am going to comment whenever I have something valuable to contribute, or whenever I really enjoyed an article.

Optimization Period 1: Baseline

So we’ve established that for the initial optimization period, I’m going to drop 100 cards per day in related categories. I will see how many visits it brought and how many comments were left. Because I’m initially optimizing for comments, the comments are all I’m concerned about. After we have our base period of three days, I will install SezWho, continue the regiment for 3 days, and report the results.

Stay Tuned

The Blog Startup Project is just getting going. We’ll be talking about optimizing your blog for comments,  stickiness and social media. We’ll be using every trick in the Entrecard book, so if you’re interested, join us for the ride! And don’t forget to tell us what you think in the comments! Look for an update every three to four days!

Wordpress Plugin Wednesday: WP-PostViews

Written on August 13th, 2008 by Saphrym

“Another great way to get people to read other posts on your blog is to… I’ll wait ’til my next Wordpress Plugin Wednesday to reveal that one.”

Remember when I said that last time I wrote the Wordpress Plugin Wednesday? If not, feel free to go read it: Wordpress Plugin Wednesday: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

As for this week, I’m writing about WP-PostViews by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. I use a few of his plugins. But this one I went searching for. Why?

People like to know popular stuff. Seriously. People love Top 10 lists. So if they see a “Most Popular Posts” section on your site, they might just click on those links, especially if it’s “above the fold.” Some people use Popularity Contest by Alex King. However, it’s been having problems since the update to 2.5 and then 2.6. I used to use Open Web Analytics and a plugin that would read the information from it and pick the most popular posts. However, it was database intensive and tended to slow my site down.

There is another method you can use. Turnip mentioned it to me before. You can look at your normal stat software (such as WordPress.com Stats or Google Analytics) and determine from those which are your most popular posts. Then you just make the widget yourself by putting in HTML code linking to those posts. I’m too lazy to do that.

So I now use: WP-PostViews

It’s very simple. It counts how often your posts are viewed. That’s it. There are settings for counting bots. There’s also a setting so you only count guest viewers (those not logged into your Wordpress blog) which helps keep yourself from getting counted. Those help with accuracy.

After you install, just configure those options and then go add the widget. As you can see below, the options for the widget are rather simple also:

There you have it. A simple addition to your Wordpress blog that will get people to click on more than just the “Drop” button. I know it works because I still get comments from EC people on blog posts that are older but on my Most Popular list. I’d recommend putting the Most Popular widget close to your Entrecard widget.

Enjoy the plugin. Next time I’ll show you how to turn those 404 pages into something more useful.

Something that every blogger using “Blogger” should do

Written on August 11th, 2008 by Graham

Our most recent commentRUSH took us to a blog using Google’s “Blogger” platform, and I noticed something that I have to spend a moment talking about. We spend a lot of time here on Entrecard talking about Wordpress, what with our Wordpress Plugin Wednesday every week, and the truth is I feel bad that we never make important recommendations for folks using the Blogger platform. So here goes.

The one change you should all make

There is one element to Blogger that has always been a barrier between commentators and comments. It is the fact that if you go to leave a comment on a “Blogger” blog, you are first re-directed to this rather awkward pop-up screen where you enter your comment in a box, fill out a capcha, and submit after which you are redirected back to the the blog. All this Vs. the Wordpress system where you enter your comment and make a single click to “submit” and bam, you’re done.

You can fix all of this, if you use blogger, with one simple enhancement.

Instead of detailing the process myself, I’ll hand off the baton to one of Entrecard’s very own: Blogger Buster -a blog I’ve found to be a very useful and authoritative voice on enhanging your Blogger blog. In this post you will learn how to add a comment form beneath your posts. And my advice is, if you use Blogger, spend two minutes to make this upgrade today.

Google should enable this feature automatically, to every blog on Blogger. But they don’t. So take the initiative and bring your basic comment system up to date from Blogger’s archaic stock configuration.

commentRUSH: S · T · I · T · C · H · E · S

Written on August 10th, 2008 by Graham

It’s been a while since we had a good old fashion commentRUSH, because things got pretty crazy for a week with the toolbar release. We’re bringin it back on track today, with S · T · I · T · C · H · E · S, and a topic that is very close to my heart. For those of you who are new, the commentRUSH is a weekly activity by Entrecard members to read a selected post and leave a comment. I guess you could say it is kind of like a book club, and it’s a great way for us to support each other in our blogging efforts.

I’m going to be mean, and not even tell you in advance what this week’s commentRUSH post is about, but nevertheless it is something everyone can sound off on.

Please support a fellow blogger and read their post, and comment your thoughts. Let’s go for the gold this time, and rile up over 200 comments! We can do it!

Update:

The comments section is under moderation, so your comment may not appear until the owner of this blog checks out their blog for the day, and realizes there are a hundred comments awaiting approval. What fun!

Musings on the EC economy

Written on August 9th, 2008 by phirate

Wordpress Plugin Wednesday: Edit Comments

Written on August 6th, 2008 by Graham

Today for Wordpress Plugin Wednesday, I’d like to direct your attention towards the WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin.

What this plugin allows you to do, or rather your commenters, is to edit their comments for a period of time after they leave them. This is a very valuable plugin when you think about it, because how many times have you left a comment with a type, or wanted to say something else, or changed your mind about saying something at all.

This plugin caters to your commenters, and in doing so encourages comments and lends to the air of professionalism about your blog. It comes highly recommended.  So instead of a long fancy post with screenshots, I’m just going to say that probably everyone using Wordpress should use this feature, and implore you to download it if you use Wordpress.

The EntreBar is here!

Written on August 3rd, 2008 by Graham

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, the long awaited Entrecard Toolbar is here and it’s smokin’ hot. The toolbar is for Firefox only, so if you’re not running the best browser on the net, I suggest you download Firefox 3. Again, to make sure it works properly, make sure you are running FIREFOX 3.

Ok, that being said, you can download the Entrebar Here.

Now, being that this is a toolbar, it will install directly to your browser. It packs the entire Entrecard.com site (I’m still amazed at this baby), and it also enhances your ability to do a lot of Entrecard related things. Let’s jump right into it.

Features

Quick Account Switching:

The first button you see is a button that lists all your accounts. Using this button, you can switch instantly between any account you own. If you don’t have multiple blogs listed at Entrecard, this won’t affect you.

Your Entrecard Menu:

The second button gives you a report of how many credits you have, and how many drops you’ve done today. Click it, and it will drop down to give you the options of visiting your dashboard, messagebox, ad calendar, Statistics, Linked Blogs page, and the buy EC page.

Who to Browse:

You can select your Inbox, Favorites, or any Entrecard Category you like, and browse these sites with a single click of a button right from your browser. The Toolbar will automatically take you to these sites.

How to Browse:

Want to browse your Inbox by the Most Popular? Or, would you like to go through the least expensive sites in the Technology category? Or perhaps you’d like to go through the most advertised sites in the celebrity category, because if they’re the most advertised, the blog is probably great. Entrecard Toolbar makes it possible.

The Jump Buttons

Click on the single green arrow, and you will instantly be taken to an Entrecard site. Click the double green arrow, and your browser will open the next 10 Entrecard sites, as per your specifications in “How to Browse” and “What to Browse”.

One-Touch Favorites

The Entrecard Toolbar allows you to bookmark your favorites with a single click. While on any Entrecard site, a heart icon will appear in the browser. If its shaded gray, it means the person is not in your favorites.

And if it lights up bright red, that means they are in your favorites.

You can add someone to your favorites, or remove someone from your favorites, simply by clicking the button. This will toggle between them, and confirm your action by displaying the appropriate heart icon.

One-Click Advertising

That’s right, Entrecard’s famous one-click advertising is now coming at you from the browser. Any site you are on will display its price in the browser, and with just a single click, you can advertise on that site.

Interaction Menu

We also packed a menu into the toolbar that gives you all the options to interact with a site. That means that right from the toolbar, you can go to someone’s profile, write them a recommendation, Tip them (give them credits), or report them for a violation.

Not only will this help improve community interaction, it should also increase the efficiency with which we weed out low quality blogs.

Entrecard Menu

Finally, we have a dropdown “Entrecard” menu, which will take you to the Entrecard Blog, the community forum, the support forum, the Bugs forum, and the Help section of the website. It will also allow you to log out.

Can you feel the excitement??

Needless to say, we are incredibly excited about this toolbar. It ports the entire Entrecard experience right to your browser, and lets it take it with you. I’ve been testing it for the past few days, and I usually keep it set to my Inbox at Random. Whenever I have a spare moment I jump around to see who’s been dropping on me, and I can’t tell you how many new blogs I’m coming across and commenting on.

You may not realize it now, but this is probably the single greatest development that Entrecard has made since we launched. This will fundamentally change the entire Entrecard system and your Browser becomes the cornerstone for your Entrecard experience, and lets you take it with you wherever you go.